Shebanator

As everyone has probably heard by now, Adobe has open sourced the Flex 2 framework under the Mozilla Public License. Congratulations to the entire Flex team! John Dowdell has collected a nice set of links to people at Adobe and elsewhere discussing the announcement.

But there is one post in particular I want to call out. In early April I wrote a post on my blog where I wrote Why Adobe is not the next Microsoft. I wrote this post in response to a thoughtful but critical post from Ted Leung (of the Chandler/Cosmo project) called Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web. Ted then responded, there were lots of comments and discussion all around, and overall I thought it was a good public conversation.

Now Ted gets to tell the other part of the story: he describes his conversations with the Flex team after his post(s), his impressions of the Adobe team, and what he thinks the announcement means. I highly recommend reading his article, and after reading it, I hope people who have been doubting our intentions will look at Adobe in a different light.

Finally, as a reminder, here’s just a few of the significant announcements around openness Adobe has made in the last few months:

1. We donated the Tamarin virtual machine to Mozilla, which Frank Hecker called “the largest single code contribution to the project since Netscape originally released the Mozilla source code in 1998”
2. We announced we were turning over control of the PDF specification to ISO via AIIM.
3. As we just announced, the Flex framework, the ActionScript 3 and MXML compilers, and our ActionScript debugger are now open source, community driven projects

There’s a whole lot more out there on Adobe Labs, and there is a lot more yet to come. These are exciting days here at Adobe!

[Update 26apr07] Michael Coté of RedMonk has written a nice article giving his perspective on the announcement. What he said fits right in with what I’m talking about here:

Obviously, as I commented when Adobe took PDF to ISO, my inner-”standards bigot” is bit softer on Adobe now. Granted, this is just an announcement of intent and road-map. Adobe is just at the beginning of truly open sourcing the Flex SDK.

~ by Andrew Shebanow on 25Apr07.

Posted in Openness, Rich Internet Applications
Tags: Microsoft